I turn over in my bed and fluff up the pillow. I fold it over once and then in the opposite direction, trying to get comfortable. It’s been an hour since I turned off the lights, and sleep is still nowhere in sight. Funny how that’s been a problem since the night of the Winters’ fall party.
My body might be tired, but my mind isn’t. It spins. The pleasant wine-buzz I’d gotten from drinks earlier with Jenna and Toby has disappeared, leaving me with a painful amount of clear-headedness.
I’d told them I was no longer dating Isaac Winter. We came to a mutual decision, I’d said. It’s best to stay professional.
Jenna had frowned at that. She’d worn a yellow blouse, her lucky color, in preparation for a date she had after our drinks. “Oh,” she’d said.
“You don’t think we made the right decision?”
“I don’t know,” she’d said, and looked at Toby beside her. “Maybe you did. But I was rooting for this.”
I’d had another sip of my wine and acted casual. “You were?”
“Yes. Well, not really because of him, because I don’t know him.”
“We know he’s deliciously handsome,” Toby had said. “So, that’s a pretty important point in his favor.”
Jenna laughed. “Yes, definitely. He has that aloof hotness, you know?”
“That’s exactly what it is,” he’d agreed.
Jenna had turned back to me. “But my point was, I was rooting for it because of you. I think it’s great that you’re dating again.”
“We’re just team Sophia getting some,” Toby said with a grin. “He was a means to an end.”
I’d rolled my eyes. “Jesus, all right.”
“Anyway, if it’s over, it’s over.” Jenna had held up her wineglass to toast. “Here’s to moving onwards and upwards. Hey, you can even download the app I’m using. We can become dating buddies!”
I’d wriggled my way out of that one. But their enthusiasm about the whole thing, about something I’d just wanted to breeze past, had gotten beneath my skin.
I turn over in bed again.
Maybe it would be easier to forget if I didn’t have to see his name every day. Winter, it says in my documents and on my project folders. Winter, winter, winter.
It’s not even my favorite season.
Damn him. Damn me. Damn all of it for happening and leaving me alone with the memory of it, unable to enjoy its sweetness. Every day something happens that I want to talk to him about. Work, tennis, life, the city.
I’d been doing okay before Isaac.
Not great, maybe, but okay. Life was predictable and monotonous. But now that he’s passed like a storm that’s breezed through a little town, everything feels out of place. There’s an absence now, a lack, where before there was just nothingness.
I turn onto my back and stare up at the ceiling. If only I’d never invited him into my apartment and never let him sleep in this bed. Maybe then I wouldn’t feel his absence quite so strongly.
My buzzer rings. The loud, piercing sound jolts me into sitting. Then it comes again, buzzing loudly from my living room.
There’s someone calling from downstairs.
Milo gives an offended little meow beside me on the bed. His eyes glitter in the near-darkness as he watches me get up.
“Stay there,” I murmur. Unnecessarily, too, because he has no intention of moving. He tucks his face between his front paws and closes his eyes.
I walk to the intercom by my front door and click down the receiver button. “Hello?”
“Soph?” a voice says. “Is that you?”
My anticipation turns to annoyance. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Soph, please,” my ex-husband says. “I just want to talk to you. I have to talk to you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes. Please come down,” he says, voice too loud in my quiet apartment. “Meet me in the lobby.”
“Go away, Percy.”
“I won’t!” he says. “I’ll stay here until morning, until you have to leave for work.”
Shit. I press down the receiver again. “Fine, but you’re not coming in, and you’re leaving the second you’ve said whatever stupid thing you’ve come here for.”
“Good, Soph. That sounds good.” His words are fuzzy around the edges.
I march into my bedroom and pull on a pair of sweatpants. Then, I stick my feet in a pair of worn-out loafers and throw over a coat, hiding most of the mismatched outfit. Irritation burns like a flame in my chest.
He’s never once come to my new place.
Sure, he must know the address, seeing as the moving company packed up all my stuff from our shared apartment and drove it straight here. But that was almost a year ago now. And while he called, and texted, and emailed nonstop in the beginning, he never came here.
I go downstairs. Percy’s standing by the front door of my building. His suit jacket is unbuttoned, and so are the first three buttons of his shirt. His hair looks mussed.
“Soph!” he says.
I open the front door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
His smile turns into a frown. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I know you don’t… I just needed to see you.”
“Well, here I am,” I say.
“You look great,” he says. “I was out with the boys tonight, but I… I just couldn’t stop thinking. I had to know, so I had to come here. Why, Soph?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you have to divorce me?” He puts a hand to his chest like he’s injured. “Why did you throw it away, all of it? You, me, our home… our future.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Soph, I’m always serious.”
“You’re never serious,” I say. “If that was the single, stupid reason you showed up here drunk, then I want you to leave.”
“Please, please, just… tell me. Explain it to me. I can’t understand it. I’ve never been able to understand it.”
“You,” I say, enunciating every syllable, “had an affair. For months. With a woman we both knew.”
He shakes his head. “I know, and that was my mistake. And I was sorry for it. I told you that, over and over and over again. Why couldn’t you just have forgiven me? Please, Soph… I’m not happy.”
“That’s not my problem anymore.”
He sighs like he didn’t hear my words. Or maybe he’s just ignoring them. He was often good at that. “I’m not happy with Scarlett. She wants and wants and wants, all the damn time. Wants me to take her to places and wants us to get married. I’m not happy… But Soph, I was happy with you. You’re so smart, and you’re so good at teasing me, and you… God, you’re pretty, too. So damn pretty.”
“The only thing you’ve ever chased is happiness,” I say, “and only the short-term kind. That’s been your whole life!”
“You’re right,” he says, nodding quickly. “You’ve always been right.”
“Too little too late, though, when it came to you.”
“I want you back. I want to be us again.”
“You broke us,” I say, and I mean it. The words fall like a scythe through the quiet, unassuming lobby of my high-rise.
I want him out of it, and I want him out of my life.
He sighs. “I know, but I’m sorry. Soph, I’m sorry. That has to count for something. I’d take it all back if I could.”
My voice hardens. “No, it doesn’t. It’s been a year, and you’re having a baby with another woman. And I’ve already moved on.”
He takes a deep breath. And then another one. “Yeah, with that man. It hurt me, seeing you with him. Is that what you want me to say? Is that the game we’ve been playing these weeks?”
The words take the air out of me. Maybe that is what I’d once wanted him to say. But not now. Not when Isaac and I were so much more than petty revenge.
“I don’t want you to say anything. What I want is for you to leave.”
“Did you just use me?” His eyes have a glazed sheen to them. “Did you just want me to introduce you to society? Fuck, that’s it, isn’t it. I was a stepping stone. You just wanted bigger and brighter, and you got it. Mom warned me once,” he says and points a finger at me, “that you were a gold digger. That she could see it in you.”
“Fuck you,” I say.
He gives a half laugh. It rings false in the wide space. “That’s it. That’s why you want him, the almighty, on-his-damn-high-horse Winter, king of the goddamn city.”
Anger flares inside of me like fireworks. “The fact that you would say that to me proves you never knew me at all. You know what? It just proves one thing, that marrying you was the biggest mistake of my life.”
His face whitens. “You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do. You cheated on me. You constantly degraded my career. You made me feel like a bad wife for wanting my own life, outside of us. You never once defended me against your mother. You didn’t want me as I actually am,” I say. “You wanted me to fit like a puzzle piece into your life instead of building a new one together.”
“What,” Percy says, voice venomous, “like he’s so fucking perfect?”
“He’s not. But he would never come to my apartment at midnight, drunk out of his mind, and accuse me of being a gold digger.”
Percy holds up his hands like this is too much. Like he can’t believe what I’m saying. “I gave you a life. I gave you everything.”
“Except a loving and faithful husband,” I say. “Except support and companionship. You know, I’m glad you found your way into bed with Scarlett, and I’m glad I saw it. Because you and I wouldn’t have lasted anyway… and I’m so damn glad I didn’t waste more of my life on you.”
His chest rises and falls. “Soph,” he says. “Fuck, you’re right. You’re so damn right, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I’m miserable.”
“I know. But it’s not enough. Can you tell me something? Honestly?”
He nods.
“It wasn’t just Scarlett, though. Was it?”
Percy turns still, like prey caught in the headlights. There’s no reply from his half open lips. But the answer is there in his drunken eyes, betraying him.
There had been others.
“Yeah,” I say softly, “I figured. Goodbye, Percy.”
“Wait.” He reaches out to grip my wrist, but I pull it out of his reach. “Soph, fuck, wait… This went all wrong.”
“Yes,” I say. “It did. You’re going to be a father, Perce. You always said you wanted that. So focus on that, on your kid. Be the best dad you can be to that little baby, and start fresh. And if you ever come to my doorstep drunk like this this again, I’ll call the police.”
He takes a deep breath, and I can see him try to pull the fragmented, drunk segments of his mind back together. “Yeah. Yeah… You’re right.”
“Leave now. Please.”
He heads to the front door. But he pauses with his hand on it. “I’m sorry,” he says.
I know he means it, but not enough for it to matter. “Goodbye,” I say.
And I mean that enough for the both of us.
The door locks behind him, and I stay put, watching as he ambles away from my building. He gets in a cab, and it drives off, taking my past away. I had never needed him to fit into this city. It’s my home, and I’ve made it mine all by myself. My relationship with New York is stronger than my marriage ever was.
Isaac had been wrong about one thing. I’m not still in love with Percy. The love had dried up when I saw through the illusion, when that Peter Pan charm of his faded, and I found only immaturity and casual cruelty in its place.
But Isaac had a point, all the same. Because it was Percy’s shadow that lurked too large in my mind. It was him, and how he hurt me, and the fear of being hurt once again. And it was myself. I had lost me somewhere over the past couple of years, and I’ve just started finding myself again. And I know now that I’ll never give her up.
But Isaac isn’t Percy.
Isaac isn’t Percy.
And I’m not who I’d been a year ago, either. Like the cab heading up Manhattan, speeding back to a place I’d once called home, it’s possible to let go of the past. To let it fade into a memory, nothing more, and be brave enough to create a new future.
